- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Serpent's Tail (26 Aug 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 185242866X
- ISBN-13: 978-1852428662
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 12.4 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 210,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
This summer?s highlight from Serpent?s Tail: the book that scandalised a nation. One Hundred Strokes has sold over 700 000 copies in Italy. One very hot Italian summer, a schoolgirl sits alone in her bedroom, staring at posters of Marlene Dietrich and listening to classical music. She strips before her mirror, examining her adolescent body pleasurably, yet without desire. She writes: ?I want love, diary. I want to feel my heart melt, to see the stalactites of my ice shatter and sink in the river of passion, of beauty.? The narrator searches for love but the men she meets only want sex. With the pain of unrequited love comes the excitement caused by her discovery of the sexual power she has over men (and other women). This diary of a teenage girl?s sex life is a work of deceptive innocence. Influenced by Nabokov and Anais Nin, it is both erotic and literary. When the book was first published, it was assumed that this could not be the work of a teenager. In fact it is the first novel of a young writer of great literary talent. ?Remarkably self-assured... the shock waves of this schoolgirl?s confession are still reverberating? The Times ?This book is remarkable. With any luck it will utterly scandalize the people who still think of teenage girls as half-formed dolls in pretty boxes. A warm and sexy read.? BelleDeJour.com ?A wisp of a book with a wallop of an impact? New York Times ?Catherine Millet can go put her clothes on. Seventeen years old, Melissa P. has become a literary phenomenon in Italy... a real literary talent in the Sicilian fabular tradition of Giovanni Verga? Les Echos
About the Author
Melissa Panarello was born in Sicily in 1985 and now lives in Rome. Her teenage diaries formed the basis of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, the book that scandalised Europe.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A sexually curious Cinderella?,
By Penguin Egg (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Paperback)
Told in diary form, this is the story of a girl's growing sexual awareness and search for love. After an unsatisfactory sexual encounter at the age of fourteen, she commits herself to the idea that by giving her body to any man that comes along, he might taste her "rage and bitterness and therefore experience a modicum of tenderness." He might also "fall so deeply in love with [her] passion that he won't be able to do without it." On this flimsy premise that only a self-obsessed teenager would find profound, we follow her from one sexual encounter to another until finally she finds her Prince Charming, who is both tender and in love with her - and, not insignificantly, good in bed. The story is something of a fairy tale aimed at teenage girls: the narrator tells us that she is ugly, but everyone else in the book comments on her beauty, including passing lorry drivers. There is a happy-ever-after quality to the ending. A Cinderella for sexually curious teenage girls, maybe? I would not call this book erotic. Despite experiencing group sex, lesbian sex, rough sex, bondage, and viewing homosexual sex, Melissa P. does not dwell on sexual descriptions in the way an erotic writer would. There is a detached air about her sexual descriptions. It is almost as if she were aiming to write a book about her growing sexual awareness in the manner of Yukio Mishima in `Confessions of a Mask.' Yet, the ending is too pat, too much like a fairytale, to be autobiographical. The dwelling on her sexual encounters raises the suspicion that this is as much a sexual fantasy as it is anything else. She falls between two stools. Too much sexual fantasising to be truly autobiographical and not enough vivid detail to be erotic. The two sexy pictures of the author are a tad suspicious, as well. Despite that, this book is enjoyable. I read it in one sitting - it is only 154 pages. The narrative pulls you along and if the story doesn't convince, it does give you an insight into what goes on in a teenage girl's head.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brutal honesty,
By A Customer
This review is from: One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Paperback)
Writing as a sixteen year old myself Melissa P. writes with a brutal honesty that most sixteen year old girls use when talking to friends, that most adults do not realise they possess. Obviously most, if not all, do not experience what Melissa P. does in her fictionalized memoir's and at times it is shocking and uncomfortable to read but she writes in such a way that you sympathise with her, in her need to be loved and understood. For most people when they read this they will not be able to belive that this is the work of a sixteen year old, but maybe it should be used as an indication of how different teenager's lives are today and how adult experiences are being sampled at a younger age. This "worldwide erotic bestseller" should definitely be read by people who dismiss teenager's as not being capable to experience real feelings. Definitely a book to be read even if it is to dismiss it as just an erotic one hit wonder or to class it as a wonderful piece of writing to give insight to a teenager's mind.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By A Customer
This review is from: One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Paperback)
Are books like this still scandalous? It was just the sort of 'diary' I thought a fanciful 14- to 16-year-old might concoct to distract themselves from their more boring reality. The writing was immature (though perhaps decent enough for such a young author), striving hard to be profound but missing the target. It was rather a pretentious book in fact. There is little plot to speak of, just a series of sexual encounters and most of these are detailed very briefly. It had too little atmosphere to be erotic. I think its major selling point is that these are the shocking 'true confessions' of a young girl, but it smacked more of the everyday sexual fantasies of the average teenager to me, and averagely written to boot.
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